Goats and Celery

October 14th Thursday.

The Frieze Art Fair takes place over 5 days in October and features over 170 galleries from around the world. This year it was on my calendar as a must-see. A queue of shivering, cloaked forms stretched beyond the huge tents in Regents Park towards a hazy infinity. Yellow and gold foliage flickered in the breezes, and someone shouted out, 'There's the Mayor of London arriving on his motorcycle!' The art critic Matthew Collings drifted by as I wondered if I'd ever reach the entrance.

Once inside the biggest tent I'd ever seen, the sense of excitement was infectious. Galleries had carved the massive space into pristine white cubicles. Each space had its own identity and I struggled against determined spectators to see the wares on display. The gallery representatives all looked so young and model-like and were worthy of being exhibits themselves. I checked around for the artists. These were the Sacred Ones, the cream of gallery artists, and I thought if I looked hard I might learn their secrets. Is there a gallery Circuit you can get on, how do you get on it, and once there, how hard is it to keep your footing?

I saw some wonderful Picasso drawings, some work by famous artists (Chris Ofili, Damien Hirst) and a fair amount of what I felt was rather cliched, sensation-grabbing stuff (a line of pornographic magazines laid across a table top). A couple of large paintings took my breath away. I handed out a few postcards of my own paintings just for the hell of it. And then reached overload, when it all spun in my mind and suddenly had no meaning!

There's so much media attention around Frieze, and the accompanying parties and bright young stars. It's like the Oscars of the Art World. But under it all, of course, is money and money-making on a huge scale. It's all about marketing - smart, relentless, fastidiouslessly planned marketing. That stark aspect stayed with me after the images faded.

So much of it comes down to fitting the current trends, and having something extra that allows you to be marketed as a brand. I used to think it was only to do with quality, but it's far more complex than that. It seems to me that artists now have to plan their careers like a game of chess. And what if your work is simply not marketable? Sometimes there is no reason why one thing sells over another, though names can be made by the big galleries. And broken.

I have a wide circle of artist friends. Some make a living from their work, some sell intermittently. One said to me recently, 'See your work as a commodity, like goats and celery at the market. You have to detach yourself emotionally when you finish a painting, and if it doesn't sell, just make another!'

('Chances.' Oil and acrylic. 70cm x 49cm)